Register for your complimentary guest pass for the hybrid Digital Marketing Solutions Summit today – you can attend in person or virtually!
The Summit allows senior marketing professionals to share forward-thinking ideas, meet new partners and discover new ways to underpin their strategies.
Your free guest pass includes:
A bespoke itinerary of relaxed, 1-2-1 meetings with innovative and budget savings suppliers
Access to a series of seminar sessions led by industry thought-leaders
Lunch & refreshments throughout
Unparalleled networking with like-minded peers, who share your challenges
While most brands want to be more empathic to social change and global issues affecting customers, many have struggled to respond effectively to recent events such as Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.
That’s according to new research, which says 81% of brand representatives surveyed in July said they adapted their marketing due to Covid-19, while 60% found it difficult to display appropriate empathy when doing so.
The research among 250 senior marketing decision makers in the UK was conducted by Sapio on behalf of marketing AI company datasine.
Over 90% of marketers are trying to be more empathic in their marketing campaigns which shows a genuine understanding of the need to respond to issues and societal events impacting consumers and audiences. However, 75% said they were unable to respond quickly enough to rapidly developing situations such as Covid-19.
Empathy has increased in importance for brands and marketers during 2020. 84% of those surveyed said that the need to respond to events with empathy has increased over the past 6 months. The top three empathy focuses identified in the research for brands right now are:
Covid-19
Black Lives Matter
Mental Health
The two most common barriers stopping brands from responding faster and more effectively to change are; the inability to measure and analyse sentiment; and a lack of knowledge around how to use data to predict the success of future campaigns, both at 38%. To help solve these issues and others, 97% of brands want to adopt technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, to help them use data more effectively for predictive analysis and automated decision making.
Emma Bonar, head of digital, Les Girls Les Boys, said: “Now more than ever it’s vital that we are able to demonstrate that we do empathise with our customers – after all these are issues that really do affect all of us. There’s a need to respond quickly and appropriately to changes in sentiment, which is where AI can help us use data to make the right decisions, and make them fast.”
Chris Loy, CTO, datasine, added: “A brand’s ability to respond rapidly and appropriately to external events affecting its audiences and customers has probably never been tested more than it has in the past six months. Truthfully, it’s becoming critical to their success. Digital marketing demands instantaneous response to the things that are happening in the world. That requires marketing professionals to be able to use data to adapt their creatives, message, visual and textual content on a continual basis in line with changing audience attitudes.
Have you confirmed your free guest pass to our hybrid Print & Digital Innovations Summit? It takes place on 12th November at the Hilton London Canary Wharf.
Benefits include;
Access to current industry seminar sessions
A bespoke itinerary of 1-2-1 meetings with innovative suppliers
Networking with peers who share your challenges
Lunch & refreshments throughout
Click here to confirm your free guest pass today – Live event and virtual attendance options are available.
Or if you have any questions then please do not hesitate to contact us.
Each month on Digital Marketing Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on different parts of the print and marketing sectors – and in September we’ll be focussing on Digital Signage.
It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help marketing industry professionals find the best products and services available today.
So, if you specialise in Digital Signage solutions and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact James Howe on j.howe@forumevents.co.uk.
Here are the areas we’ll be covering, month by month:
Sep – Digital Signage Oct – Brochure Printing Nov – Creative & Design Dec – Online Strategy
Have you secured your place at the upcoming Print & Digital Innovations Summit? It’s taking place on November 12th and you can attend in person or remotely!
Your attendance is entirely free and will give you access to a range of benefits including; access to budget-saving and innovative solution providers, current industry seminar sessions, networking with peers, lunch and refreshments throughout.
Each month on Digital Marketing Briefing we’re shining the spotlight on different parts of the print and marketing sectors – and in August we’ll be focussing on Conversion Rate Optimisation.
It’s all part of our ‘Recommended’ editorial feature, designed to help marketing industry professionals find the best products and services available today.
So, if you specialise in Conversion Rate Optimisation solutions and would like to be included as part of this exciting new shop window, we’d love to hear from you – for more info, contact James Howe on j.howe@forumevents.co.uk.
Here are the areas we’ll be covering, month by month:
Aug – Conversion Rate Optimisation Sep – Digital Signage Oct – Brochure Printing Nov – Creative & Design Dec – Online Strategy
Don’t worry if you missed last week’s online breakfast webinar from Mapp Digital – You can now re-watch the entire session online!
With the emergence of Covid-19 and social distancing, many businesses have had to refocus on their online channels, accelerating the need for digital transformation and better marketing. But competition for online customers has increased. Are you just going through the motions, or are you actually optimising your digital activity?
To help digital marketers in these uncertain times, Mapp has developed The Digital Marketing Playbook, an interactive guide featuring 100 tactics that are proven to bring results whatever marketing objectives you’ve set for your business. Not only will the Playbook help you to plan your digital programmes more effectively, but it will also help you to build marketing resilience and agility, two essential ingredients for thriving in rapidly changing environments.
Mapp ran an online breakfast event to introduce the Playbook and take you through how to implement some of the most useful digital tactics that it features.
Here’s what you will gain from re-watching this popular session:
100 different tactics and ideas on how to acquire, nurture, grow and retain customers
Best practice on how to implement a selection of the best tactics
Learn how to bake agility and resilience into your marketing programmes
Easily prioritise tactics focusing first on the ones that will bring the largest ROI with the least effort
A Costa Coffee eGift Card worth £8 if you attend the live webinar and are among the first 300 people that register.
We are living through extremely uncertain times regarding both public safety and the global economy. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, we were teetering on the brink of a recession. Economists such as David Blanchflower compared the pre-Covid financial landscape to that of pre-banking crash 2008. If nothing else, this is a major red flag which should give you the motivation you need to take every possible measure to protect your business.
Is an international recession on the horizon?
At the very beginning of the year, the UN warned that we could be facing a global recession in 2020. That was before taking the impact of Covid-19 into account. Factors including trade wars, currency fluctuations, and Brexit were all amounting to an uncertain global economy and the Unctad report, “global growth will fall from 3% in 2018 to 2.3% this year — its weakest since the 1.7% contraction in 2009”.
Add the impact of Covid-19 to the already precarious situation, and we are now expecting to be hit with a recession rivalling even the magnitude of the Great Depression (and far worse than the 2008 financial crash). As of June this year, the global growth projection for 2020 has fallen to -4.9 per cent (1.9 per cent below the forecast made by the World Economic Outlook (WEO) in April). In addition, the road to recovery doesn’t look like it will be as fast as the WEO initially predicted, and they are now only forecasting a 5.4 per cent global growth for 2021, 6.5 per cent lower than the predictions before Covid-19. Low income households are expected to feel a particular acute financial impact, and global poverty, which has been significantly reduced since the 1990s, is likely to reach another crisis point.
Because of strain on the global economy, we are expected to encounter rising levels of debt in both developing and advanced countries, as well as a “global downturn that could increase unemployment and inequality”, as stated by Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund. Redundancies and a decline in job vacancies on an international basis are expected to follow such a crash, with unemployment rates increasing at an alarming rate.
How hard will the UK be hit?
The OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) most recent reports do not look promising. Experts have predicted that the UK will likely be the worst hit country in Europe and the economy is forecasted to contract by 11.5 per cent after the first wave of the pandemic. If we end up seeing a second of Covid-19 later in the year, this contraction is predicted to increase to 14 per cent.
One of the major reasons why the UK is likely to feel such a stark economic impact is our country’s reliance on the service industry for our economic growth, a sector which has been particularly damaged by the repercussions of Covid-19.
In addition to the economic factors surrounding Covid-19, the US trade war with China has caused a larger drag on global growth than anticipated, and the UK will be on the receiving end of the economic repercussions. What’s more, the looming prospect of Brexit poses different threats to the UK’s economy. At best, the uncertainty caused by both Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic has created a hesitant consumer base in the UK. Customers are spending less and are more cautious of businesses than ever. It is a difficult time to maintain customer loyalty, as would-be consumers are tightening their purses in the fear of a looming financial disaster.
Learn how to protect your business
Times may be challenging, but if you think ahead, you’ll be able to safeguard your business against a recession. Businesses that prepare for every eventuality are the ones that not only survive but thrive in the face of adversity. Leaving it too late to implement a recession strategy could be your undoing, so get ahead of the game and prepare for a period of great financial difficulty. Here are some key strategies that will help your business face economic uncertainty:
Focus on existing customers — as we have discussed, consumers aren’t spending as much due to lack of trust and growing apprehension. Because of this, it is essential that you focus on your existing customer base during testing financial times. This will increase brand loyalty and grow customer confidence. Offer them benefits and reasons to stay true to your brand.
Put some adjacency and extension strategies in motion — a recession is not the time to start looking into completely new avenues of profit. However, you can’t let your services become stagnant. Adjacency strategy is the optimum solution to this — find an area adjacent to your core product or services to expand into. Extension strategy is similar: take your current service a little further and offer new and exciting opportunities or products to existing customers. Ensure that you have a flexed forecast so that the business is fully prepared for all possible outcomes of this new strategy.
Forge some powerful alliances — mergers, acquisitions, and alliances are all key strategies during a recession. Alliances offer a great way to expand your business without investing in anything completely new during times of uncertainty.
Don’t be afraid to outsource — outsourcing key elements of your business can save you time, money, and financial anxiety during a recession. Outsourcing your accounts department may allow you create scale and flexibility within your organisation.
Reduce inventory costs — look to see if your business has the leeway to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of the services or products it provides. This will help to take the pressure off your finances.
Don’t sacrifice your marketing budget — often, brands make cuts to their marketing budgets in response to financial anxiety. However, this will spell disaster for your company. There is no time more crucial to maintain your marketing efforts and show customers that your brand is tackling the recession and winning.
Tighten up on your corporate governance — companies that see a downturn in performance are more likely to survive if they have good corporate governance embedded into their culture. Part of this is ensuring that the company has had a financial audit. If in doubt, contact an accountancy from that specialises in audits, tax advice, and small business VAT.
No one knows quite what to expect over the coming months and years, but now is the time to start safeguarding your business against an imminent recession. The road ahead does not look easy, but if you put certain measures in place and react in a timely manner, there’s still time to recession-proof your business and come out on top.
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